Expert scientists wrong again: Bumper snow season kicks off in Australia

Year after year they told us it would get warmer, ski seasons would get shorter and children won’t know what snow is. Instead Thredbo in the Australian Alps has just had 125cm of snow, a full 4 feet in 7 days, which some are calling a 54 year record. Skiers in Australia are thrilled.

https://twitter.com/grand_solar/status/1534181676854788097

NSW snow season ‘best in 20 years’ as weather experts’ dire predictions fall flat

Daily Telegraph

In my many years living and working in Thredbo, I have never seen the Village so covered in snow ahead of the June long weekend,” Thredbo Resort general manager Stuart Diver said.

In the year 2000 the world’s top global warming experts at East Anglia University claimed “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” within a few years.

In 2003, a CSIRO report found that the total area covered by snow in Australian mountains could fall by up to 40 per cent.

“By 2020, the average annual duration of snow-cover decreases by between five and 48 days; maximum snow depths are reduced and tend to occur earlier in the year; and the total area covered […]

EnergyAustralia (a Chinese company) tells Government we need a plan to end Australian coal

EnergyAustralia is 100% owned by China Light and Power (CLP Group) and owns a suite of generators that include coal, gas, wind farms and battery storage in Australia. It was sold by the NSW government for $1.4 billion in 2011. According to Wikipedia, the mothership company, CLP, owns “a number of power stations in Asia” and most are either coal-fired or fossil fuel power stations. It also owns Hong Kong Nuclear Investment Company.

Yallourn Power Plant, | Malcolm Paterson, CSIRO

 

A year ago the same company that announced it was speeding up the closure of Yallourn coal power plant to 2028 instead of 2032, now warns the transition “may not be smooth” and the governments plan to pay incentives to keep them open “may not be enough”. But back in March last year, when EnergyAustralia said it wanted to close Yallorn, it also said that it wanted to show that the transition is possible “without disruption”. In fact the Managing Director raved at the time “”We are determined to show Australia, that it is possible to move from the old to the new in a way that does not leave people behind.”. Blah Blah Blah, eh?

The […]

Weekend Unthreaded

10 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

Cold snaps and blistering electricity prices downunder — where one state burnt $2.4b in electricity in May

And the bonfire continues

As cold fronts sweep across the south east of Australia electricity prices are setting records nobody wants to set. The wholesale prices for electricity –across a whole month — soared past $300 a megawatt hour in three states of Australia. In NSW the cumulative cost of wholesale electricity for May alone worked out at $2.4 billion dollars. It’s enough to build a power plant. Back in 2015, before Hazelwood old brown coal plant closed and Australia installed more renewable energy per capita than anywhere else on the planet, the average price in NSW was $35/MWh. Back then it cost $260 million for the whole month. (And Hazelwood wasn’t even in NSW. ) The point is not about one coal plant, but about how recently the system still worked and how fast it fell apart. Hazelwood coal plant in 2017 was 53 years old and still selling electricity at $30 per megawatt hour when it was shut down. Since then the whole grid has so much more capacity yet so much less ability. There’s no resilience left. A few speed bumps wiped out the whole road train.

 

Wholesale electricity prices are higher across the […]

Sudden Adult Death Syndrome: because young people die, just like that

In the year of collapsing athletes, we now have the coincidental rise of SADS

Naturally, its nothing to do with new large medical programs done for emergency use. We know that because of all the detailed human trial data that the FDA and company in question wanted to hide until 2096, and which we still haven’t seen in full.

But if you hear of someone young and healthy dying there’s a word for that now — “normal”, I mean SADS.

Healthy young people are dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a mysterious syndrome – as doctors seek answers through a new national register

Daily Mail

People aged under 40 are being urged to have their hearts checked because they may potentially be at risk of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.The syndrome, known as SADS, has been fatal for all kinds of people regardless of whether they maintain a fit and healthy lifestyle. The term is used when a post-mortem cannot find an obvious cause of death.

The US-based SADS Foundation has said that over half of the 4,000 annual SADS deaths of children, teens or young adults have one of the top two warning […]

Trip in EV saves $100 but costs hours

So a lady tried to drive an EV from New Orleans to Chigago and back in less than four days with a car that had a battery life of 310 miles on a trip that was 2,000 miles long. She saved $100 in fuel but the fast chargers weren’t fast, the waits were inconvenient, and then there was the stress and uncertainty of just not knowing, and of wandering around unknown streets on foot, waiting for the car to charge, and trying to make appointments that failed. It took 12 hours to drive a 7.5 hour trip on the way there. But on the return as the weather got worse, so did the battery mileage. Just when you need it, it isn’t there… they ended up getting only 4 hours sleep on the last night so they could allow long enough to fit in the charges on the last leg.

Remember, you’re suffering so your great-grandchildren won’t have too.

Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart

The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend on a four-day road trip from New Orleans to Chicago and back in an electric vehicle (EV) that ended up as a disaster — one that left […]

3,2,1, Panic: Climate change could make humans shrink

Great Headlines in Science:

“Climate crisis could make humans shrink in size, says fossil expert”

Where science is just like a movie set

It’s another great moment in science leaving beleaguered teenagers wondering if their kids will be shorter than them. Perhaps if they can buy an EV, they wonder, Johnny will be as tall as his dad?

Or maybe the journalist could have said “in five million years” because that’s the kind of time-frame this scientist is talking in:

Nicola Davis, The Guardian

The climate crisis may lead the human race to shrink in size, as mammals with smaller frames appear better able to deal with rising global temperatures, a leading fossil expert has said.

Let’s make that “in five million years without air-conditioning”. Because the whole story applies to humans living au naturel, like Eocene Horsies did.

Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that the way in which other mammals have previously responded to periods of climate change could offer an insight into humans’ future.

He likened the potential plight of people as similar to that […]

The Climate War will never be the same: it was a lame Cold War substitute until real War returned

Ted Nordhous argues powerfully that Climate Change is simply not the main event anymore, and the climate punters are shellshocked. Russia’s War Is the End of Climate Policy as We Know It

by Ted Nordhous, Foreign Policy

Tactical exercise with the withdrawal of the Topol mobile ground-based missile system in the Serpukhov branch of the Strategic Missile Forces Military Academy

Virtually overnight, the war in Ukraine has brought the post-Cold War era to a close, not just by ending Europe’s long era of peace, but by bringing basic questions of energy access back to the fore.

If recent months have demonstrated anything, it is that war, insecurity, and economic crisis are merciless teachers. Climate advocates and their political allies have often engaged in the policy equivalent of smoking one’s own supply: They have confused the subsidy-driven growth of renewable energy with evidence that the world is ready to rapidly transition off fossil fuels. Hence, they discouraged the production of oil and gas wherever they could and chronically underinvested in other sources of clean energy, such as nuclear power. But while there has been technological progress, the global economy is still very far […]

The Energy Crisis in Australia gets deeper

Shh. The Renewable Crash Test Dummy is at work

Another coal fired turbine blew this weekend and will be out for a month, adding to the problems facing the Australian grid, where gas was the main filler-of-gaps in the forced transition but gas now costs a fortune, and we don’t have much else to fall back on. If only we had vast reserves of brown coal that was close to power stations?

If only we looked after those power stations and treated them like our lifestyle depended on them instead of like they were evil Storm Machines Mogambo!

The warnings are growing louder — our aluminium smelters are already going on standby to save us from rolling blackouts and it’s only the first week of winter. Retailers are going broke, asking customers to leave. The market system rides on long term futures contracts which hold the monster prices at bay, and everyone prays a storm doesn’t break an interconnector…

Manufacturers in peril as energy crisis deepens

Perry Williams, The Australian

Delta Electricity, which operates NSW’s Vales Point station, said it was concerned by the precarious situation, with fuel costs rising and tight supplies of coal. […]

Welcome to the Unreliables: Town sues over $4m Geothermal Failure that never delivered a single Watt

Australia has no shortage of hot rocks, but it turns out to be harder to capture than people expected:

Click to enlarge | ABC

Seven years ago everyone was excited in Winton Queensland. The new Geothermal project would only cost $3.5 million but it would save “$15 million” in electricity bills over the next twenty years and “should be operational by the end of 2016”.

Now in 2022:

Council launches legal action over $4m geothermal plant that’s never delivered power

The renewable energy project was set to be the only operating geothermal power plant in the country and was touted as the start of a geothermal windfall in the region. But more than two years since construction finished, it has never delivered power and is not operational.

“It’s bloody disappointing, to put it mildly, for such a great potential for the water that comes into town,” Winton Shire Council Mayor Gavin Baskett said.

What went wrong? “Technical issues”. The ABC doesn’t get to the bottom of this, but the water was just not close enough to boiling.

Martin Pujol, principal hydrogeologist at Rockwater, said at 86C, the Winton project would […]

Where have all the cyclones gone? Global Hurricanes quietest in last 30 years

Children won’t know what a cyclone is

Hurricane activity, after human emissions and CO2 levels reach highest ever recorded, is now close to lowest ever recorded.

Based on a trend starting in 2019 major hurricanes may disappear entirely by 2035. What if Net Zero means “no cyclones”?

h/t ClimateDepot and NotalotofPeopleKnowthat

Spot the effect of Chinese coal plants on global hurricane frequency.

@RogerPielkeJr

 

If the situation were flipped, try to imagine that the media would not write headlines like “Hurricanes near highest level ever recorded” and “Signs of Climate change seen in near record hurricane season”, or “Worst Cyclone season for thirty years!

Here’s The Guardian a year ago. But it could have been Forbes, The New York Times, the Washington Post. All of them..

 

The Guardian

It’s just one more Redpill moment to share with friends.

REFERENCES 2022 Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) Accumulated cyclone energy: Wikipedia 9.9 out of 10 based on 41 ratings […]

Follow the Science: Painful births might improve the weather — If we go anesthetic-free will we hold back the tide?

It’s a cult: Another Woke Dilemma

Should women in childbirth be warned that their anesthetic might heat the climate a hundred years from now? You know, toss it around, will I or won’t I? On the one hand, there’s hours of what some consider the worst pain they’ll ever feel, or there are other pain-killers which might not be as safe (but it’s only a baby right?). On the other hand, it’s possible that when their baby turns eighty the world might be 0.000 degrees cooler thanks to Mum? You Go Girl!

Frankly, if they wait to ask this in the labor ward – it’s far too late. Women need to hear this on the phone while booking their first appointment. That way they can run, don’t walk, run and find a real doctor — one that looks at data — not the ones scoring points in a science fashion contest.

Is nitrous oxide a climate risk?

Elios Visontay, The Guardian

A report in Australasian Anaesthesia notes that while nitrous oxide – known as laughing gas when used as an anaesthetic – is an effective method of pain relief during labour, the gas represents 7% […]

Electricity Hunger Games downunder —  potential sighting of four hour price bonfire

It’s a grid on the edge

Like a meteor-shower, the dinner time performance today may or may not be a spectator event. The fun may start at 4:30pm in Qld, NSW, Vic, SA and Tasmania — a full quinfecta at $15,000 per MW/h. The first wave of winter cold is about to wash over the grid, and those solar panels will fail just as people plug in their heaters, ovens, dryers and kettles and there is a four hour spike at $15,000MWh forecast. The graph below is the forecast for NSW, but it is essentially the same tsunami shape and dimension in every single state of the National Energy Market. Right now I presume there are engineers in the control rooms sweating over alternatives and they may well pull it off. These wildly high spikes have a way of resolving at the last minute. But think for a moment what kind of stakes we’re playing with. Hypothetically, if there was a 12,000MW demand for 4 hours in NSW at $15,000, that’s $720 million dollars worth of electricity. A few days like that would pay for a new coal plant, but no one seems to be listening to that price signal…

[…]

Half the French Nuclear Fleet is down

Strategically, this seems like it matters.

The French nuclear power plants are the backbone of the EU grid, but this winter, just when Europe is trying to not-buy-Russian-Gas, the French might need to import power instead of export it.

France runs off 70% nuclear power — it’s highest proportion in the world, and the second largest fleet — after the USA. For some reason, known only to international bankers or Renewable Gods, Early in Macron’s reign, he decided to reduce the carbon-free reliable nukes to just 50% by 2035 and fill the gap with short-lived, unreliable generators that cost a lot, need storage, backup, rare metals from China and slave labor from the Congo. Perhaps he was afraid (or whoever it was that helped him get elected) that France would show up all the schmuck-countries going to renewables?

But then the gas crisis started in Europe last October, and like clockwork, in November President Macron muttered the words “energy independence” and belatedly announced that it wasn’t such a bad idea to build some new nuclear plants. As things got more serious, in late February the French nuclear safety authority decided to extend the life of the 32 oldest reactors for […]

While Australia is rushing to close coal plants, the UK is thinking of keeping them running

In Australia a Woke tech-billionaire has decided to “keep” the coal assets in AGL in order to destroy them (like that’s the “free market” at work) . But in the rest of the world, coal is $400 a ton and everybody wants it.

Maybe Australians will get so rich selling coal they can afford to use electricity from unreliable generators instead?

Not behaving like a stranded asset. Trading Economics

Britain could keep coal-fired power plants open this winter

LONDON (Reuters) -Some of the British coal-fired power plants slated for closure this year might need to stay open to ensure electricity supply this winter, the government said on Monday.

Countries across Europe are drawing up contingency plans against potential disruption to flows of Russian gas because of the war in Ukraine. Russia typically supplies about 40% of Europe’s gas.

Britain can generate about 50% of its electricity from gas. Although Russia only meets about 4% of Britain’s gas needs, a significant disruption in supply would affect prices in Europe and make it harder for Britain to secure gas from others.

How screwed is that market when they have to “devise” a framework to […]

Another La Nina? Climate models just flummoxed. This is not supposed to happen!

We can hear the angst and confusion — Another “nasty La Nina?”, “Something weird is going on”, “They (La Ninas) don’t know when to leave”. Oh no!

These are not the words we’d expect to hear from experts who can 97% predict the climate a century from now. The bad news for the modelers is that the climate on Earth seems to be controlled more by the Pacific Oscillation than anything else and they have no idea what drives that pattern, so they can’t predict it more than a few months ahead, and sometimes not even then. And if they can’t predict the Pacific — they can’t predict anything. The hottest of hot years are El Nino, and the coldest years are La Nina and the greatest modelers the world-has-ever-known still get their barbecue summers wrong. The droughts, the floods and the bushfires follow the swinging surface water of the worlds largest ocean. Whenever they happen, the models say “climate change” but the models never tell us which will hit us this time next year.

So here we are with hints that there might be another La Nina, a third in a row, and Oh-the-disappointment! The modelers thought there […]

Cult of Green: Because no 1,000 year old forest is complete without industrial wind turbines

In Germany, praise be to Gaia, it’s Green to knock down a forest that has sat undisturbed for a thousand years to put wind farms in, and then plant saplings in a fake forest somewhere else as a carbon sink.

When will the environmentalists realize they have been taken for a ride by investment bankers and the renewables industry? Let’s help them speed up that “transition”. There’s a Red-pill moment here. File the story of the Reinhardswald, “fairy-tale forest” away for those moments when a teenager turns up to tell you how important it is to save old growth forest. Exactly, you can say… would you like too help stop the latest rapacious attack on rare heritage forest?

Being “Green” is nothing more than a badge people wear to their weekend dinner party.

NoTricksZone has reported on this environmental crime in February 2022 when the access roads started to go in. In the latest news Swiss NZZ Daily has described it as the absurdity of the German energy transition:

In the fall, the Documenta management planted oaks in the fairytale Reinhardswald near Kassel to save the climate. Now the forest is to give way to wind turbines, which […]

Monday Open Thread

9 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

Doomer Storms of 2080 are here 60 years early — sayth short cherry-picked storm data from pagan climate-model

It’s the usual apocalyptic headline, hyped from a press release smoked out of a Nature paper, which was pumped from a climate model:

“Climate change already causing storm levels only expected in 2080”

An Israeli study published on Thursday found that climate change is already causing a “considerable intensification” of winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere to a level not anticipated until 2080.

It’s bleak I tell you:

“New data reveals climate change might be more rapid than predicted”

In the new study, Chemke and his team compared climate model simulations with current storm observations. Their discovery was bleak: It became clear that storm intensification over recent decades has already reached levels projected to occur in the year 2080.

Yet again we see true mastery of confirmation bias at work: When the climate models underestimate things it means doom is coming faster. When they overestimate things, it means the equipment is faulty. What would 28 million radiosondes know?

There must be 1,000 permutations of climatoid factors that could be measured across regions of the Earth, but Lo — there has been an intensification of Winter Mid-Latitude Storms in the Southern Hemisphere! Not summer storms, spring storms, […]

WHO Chief wants to run the world (for China), Biden, Boris, Albanese is OK with that, but Africa puts the brakes on

We can all use some good news

Tedros Adhanom

In the latest installment of Big Government Badness the WHO is meeting right now to consider some amendments suggested by the US and largely agreed by about 47 rich nations for no real benefit. The US suggested these changes in January and for months almost no politician anywhere said a thing. The changes give broader powers to the head honcho of the WHO — Tedros Adhanhom Ghebreysus. He’s the man who told the world to keep flying in Chinese Bioweapons through their front door in January 2020, while he also told everyone how transparent and wonderful President Xi was: “China is protecting the people in the whole world”! He actually said that. China was stopping all flights out of Wuhan to the rest of China, but not to Italy, Iran, or anywhere else, and they lied about human to human transmission, and said it was preventable and curable, while they harvested up masks and PPE from around the world to profiteer from them later. China lied about the bats in the lab, and WHO helped cover it up.

No one can explain why the rich nations of the world […]